Hey guys, today's blog is a continuation of the Making of Knight Estate series, and this should be the final part. In the previous parts, I mentioned how I came up with the game idea, how I taught myself to make that type of game, and all the changes I made to accommodate the demands of creating such a game.
The final part of Phase 1 was completion of testing. First of all, the testing phase was kind of a mess. I had been too busy building the game, and as a solo dev doing my first game, this was inevitable.
Come September 2024, all I knew was that you had to pay to publish a game on the Google Play Store. After I finished that step, the coming realizations hit me like a ton of bricks. Google Play Store required all apps to complete a 14 day testing phase, which has now been reduced to 12. I hadn't informed anybody in the community about this, so I immediately posted on Discord that I needed people to help me test the game.
Not only was the 14 day testing period a shocker for me, but the number of testers needed was 20, that was a lot more than I knew I'd get without more marketing. Matter of fact, out of like 50 people on Discord, only 3 or 4 opted in to test the game. I had to get 20 people somehow.
A few days before getting a Google Play developer account, I had already announced everywhere on social media that the game would be ready to play on November 30th. So I knew I had a little over a month to get done with testing. The game was also far from complete at this time. November 30th started feeling like a dare to myself instead of a deadline. It was like I had to achieve some kind of feat to make it happen.
I started juggling even more responsibilities, coding, art, posting on social media to get testers. I sucked at posting on social media. Twitter/X had apparently died after Elon took over, so I had no traction whatsoever. After weeks of posting, I even tried to replicate posts by successful indie games in my genre, but nothing worked.
Fast forward to November 1st, and I had like 10 testers, embarrassing, I know. I had to be more targeted with my posting, otherwise, I was shooting in the dark. I started targeting communities on Reddit, and out of like 10 posts, I'd get 2 or 3 people. By November 30th, the game had to be announced as a testing release.
During this period up until 2025, the game was an absolute disaster, nothing worked. I even contemplated making it a PC game, yet the mobile version was completely bug, infested. I gathered a few friends to fill the remaining tester spots, and by March 2025, the game was out of testing. I now started dealing with imposter syndrome because the game was going to start getting public reviews. I had to spend another month trying to deal with the issues that existed in the testing release. I had to get serious about it, otherwise, the game would fail, and to me, failure wasn't getting too few downloads, but releasing a game that doesn't make players feel hopeful about it, because it was and still is a work in progress.
My strategy was always to release a game that improves with every update. This was going to be possible based on user feedback, and this would place power in their hands. Even I would love to be part of such a project, a project that is only complete when both parties agree that it is.
Knight Estate is currently public on Google Play, and I'm currently perfecting the Android version. Until then, I won’t release it on iOS. Once all that is done, I'll release it on PC, and when the players and I are satisfied, I'll call it a day regarding Knight Estate and embark on a new adventure.
That's it for today, folks. I'll see you in the next blog.
